CLLD – Cross-Linguistic Linked Data

Glottolog 2.4 released

posted Tuesday, April 07, 2015 by Robert Forkel

Two weeks ago we released version 2.4 of Glottolog - our comprehensive language catalog and bibliography. This update includes the addition of 76 languages resulting in moderate corrections of the classification , as well as two changes which are worth highlighting: 68131 new references and a new collaborative curation model.

68131 new references

The first results of our agreement with publisher De Gruyter are 68131 new references, representing about 3900 books and 4900 journal issues on language and linguistics published by De Gruyter.

While a lot of these references are somewhat different from the typically descriptive works collected so far in Glottolog and most of them cannot readily be associated with any language, we still think this is an important step towards fulfilling Glottolog's claim of comprehensiveness.

Glottolog data on GitHub

The second big step we took with Glottolog 2.4 is a new way of data curation. So far, feedback about and collaboration on the Glottolog data has been almost exclusively restricted to sending emails to the editors. As of version 2.4, the Glottolog data is curated in a Git repository on GitHub.

This means, that work on Glottolog becomes a lot more transparent - in particular in between releases; and even more importantly the big catalyst for collaboration that is GitHub can be harnessed for work on Glottolog:

• Notify us about issues with the data by - well - opening an issue.
• Track changes of the data by following our commits.
• Curate your own version of data by forking the repository or - better yet -
• send us a pull request, thereby contributing your additions.

Glottolog data elsewhere

With clld/glottolog-data the authoritative raw source of the data and glottolog.org the authoritative access point to releases of this repository, there are still more ways to get at Glottolog data, recognizing the different requirements of our users:

Glottolog 2.4 on datahub.io

To make Glottolog part of the Linguistic Linked Open Data Cloud we provide an RDF dump of the data at datahub.io.

Glottolog 2.4 on zenodo

If you need a stable snapshot of version 2.4 of the Glottolog data with a citeable DOI, this is the place to go.

glottolog3 version 2.4 on zenodo

And if you want to revive this snapshot of the data, make sure you grab the corresponding app source code from here.

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